Rare Earth – (I Know) I’m Losing You

Motown Told Them They Had to Cover Another Temptations Song – Norman Whitfield Came In to Produce It Himself

By the summer of 1970, Rare Earth had already done something nobody expected. Their rock version of the Temptations’ “Get Ready” — a 21-minute jam that Motown edited down to under three minutes for radio — had climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and gone gold. They were a white band from Detroit on a Motown subsidiary that had literally been named after them, and they had cracked the R&B charts at a moment when almost no white rock act could make that claim. The logical next move, from Motown’s perspective, was entirely predictable: find another Temptations song and do it again. The band, who saw themselves as closer to the Rolling Stones than to any soul act, had reservations. Motown had leverage. Norman Whitfield — who had co-written “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and produced the Temptations’ original version in 1966 — was brought in to oversee the sessions and ensure the result landed.

It landed. The album version of the track, recorded for Ecology in 1970, ran to nearly twelve minutes — room for every member of the band to stretch out, for Pete Rivera’s drum passages to develop their own momentum, for Gil Bridges’ saxophone to take the song somewhere the Temptations’ original had never gone. Whitfield then cut it down to just under four minutes for the single. He was, as Rivera later noted in his autobiography, a master at editing. The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on August 1, 1970, peaked at number seven, and spent fourteen weeks on the chart. It also crossed onto the R&B chart — the second time in a row that a Motown rock act had connected with an audience that the label’s executives had not necessarily predicted. A Motown executive at the time recalled that the band were “really upset — they wanted to be the Rolling Stones.” What the charts showed was that they had become something more complicated and harder to categorise than that.

The Show That Still Mattered in 1970

The Ed Sullivan Show, by the autumn of 1970, was in its final years — it would air its last episode in 1971 — but it remained one of the few television platforms where a performance reached every demographic simultaneously. Sullivan had introduced America to Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones from the same stage at CBS Studio 50 in New York. For Rare Earth to appear there on September 27, 1970 was to occupy a specific space in the cultural calendar: a rock band on the most establishment variety show in American broadcasting, playing a song that had originally belonged to Motown’s defining vocal group, on a label that existed because Motown had wanted a piece of the rock market. The layers of that context were invisible to most viewers, who simply watched Pete Rivera sing and play drums simultaneously — a physical feat that anchored every Rare Earth live performance — while the band built the song into something considerably larger than three minutes of radio-friendly product.

The original “(I Know) I’m Losing You” had been written by Eddie Holland, Cornelius Grant, and Norman Whitfield. The Temptations’ version, featuring David Ruffin on lead vocals, had reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the R&B chart in 1966. Whitfield’s production on that original was already muscular by Motown standards — tighter and more percussive than the label’s typical smooth arrangements. Rare Earth took that tension and amplified it outward. Where Ruffin’s delivery was controlled and precise, Rivera attacked the lyric with the urgency of a band that had been playing clubs in Detroit for nearly a decade and had no interest in underplaying. The song’s underlying feeling — loss that tips into anger, the voice of someone who can see what is happening and cannot stop it — survived the translation completely. Kanye West later sampled Rare Earth’s version, alongside that of the Undisputed Truth, in “Fade” from his 2016 album The Life of Pablo.

The lineup performing on The Ed Sullivan Show that September evening was the core band that had made Ecology: Rivera on lead vocals and drums, Bridges on saxophone and flute, Rod Richards on guitar, John Persh on bass, Kenny James on keyboards, and Eddie Guzman on congas and percussion — the sixth member who had been added in late 1969 and whose presence gave the rhythm section a density that the recordings on their own could not fully capture. This footage preserves a version of Rare Earth at the moment of their commercial peak — not yet through the personnel changes that would complicate the years ahead, not yet facing the label tensions that came with Motown’s move to Los Angeles. On a Sunday evening in New York, on a show that was already becoming a relic, they played like a band with somewhere to be.